Contact Client Service

Contact the department

Lot essay

Extremely rare in the market, these four early works (Lot 378 through Lot 381) by Kim Tschang-Yeul from his Composition series and Rite series were created while the artist was living in New York. Works from these two early series were painted between 1965 and 1969, prior to Kim's artistic development of his famous Water Drop series from the 1970s. (Fig. 1)

Famous art critic Daniel Abadie, commented on these early period works," Imagine the surprise at learning that, prior to these drops of water that appear to distill his entire artistic research, Kim Tschang Yeul had practiced a form of abstraction that places his work in an enti rely dif ferent perspective. The paintings of that period (1964- 1969) are few in number because many were destroyed. Their thick textures, their large, incised lines that trace the violence of the artist's gesture like slashes in the flesh of the canvas, and their expressive colours that seem awash in blood and emotion … Nevertheless, far from the expressionist excess of American and European artists, and no doubt dependent on his Eastern education, the work of Kim Tschang-Yeul remains restrained and reflective: his definition of margins of the painting, the neutrality of the compositions, and the repetitive character of the painted lines bring his paintings closer to the work of Monoha, and to what would in France soon would become the Supports/ Surfaces group, rather than to abstract lyricism." (Daniel Abadie," Kim Tschang-Yeul, like two drops of water…," Kim Tschang-Yeul, The National Museum of China, Beijing, China, 2004, pp. 35-36.)

Cataloguing & details

Provenance

Acquired directly from the artist thence by decent to the present owner
Private Collection, USA